How Come No Guitars Have The Means For External Switching Of Their PU's?

TSJMajesty

TSJMajesty

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Or do any, and I've just never heard of them?

Seems logical to me- Rig the electronics a bit differently so that a special cable not only carries your signal, but also the means to switch on 1,2,3, or any combination of your PU's, down to some type of foot controller.

And while we're at it, make it so you can coil-tap, reverse polarity, basically move anything you presently control on the guitar, down to the floor.

I mean, somebody thought to move the volume and tone down there; why stop at just that?
 
Great idea, but not would many would buy I guess. It would need a special cable or bluetooth and a floor box to control. Guitarist in general are much to traditional for any of that. Plus resell value would be sh!t.
 
I think the closest we’ve gotten to that is the Line 6 Variax stuff (which I’ve recently been interested in). The next step up from that would be BC Rich’s insane switching options. :rofl

8-String-Bich-Bass-Controls.jpg
 
TSJMajesty said:
Seems logical to me- Rig the electronics a bit differently so that a special cable not only carries your signal, but also the means to switch on 1,2,3, or any combination of your PU's, down to some type of foot controller.
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A friend of mine did that once, using a special 3 pole cable (looked pretty much like an XLR cable but with an extra pole, might've even been a 5 pole cable, don't remember anymore).
He even had his guitar switching controlled by one of the switching systems back then (maybe from EXEF, now kinda extinct german company, again I don't exactly remember).
Certainly made everyone go like "wow, now your hands can concentrate on playing only" or so.
But that didn't last long, as it turned out to be the least practicable thing ever. Sure, he kept the original switching intact (no problem, you can simply tap each pickup wire) so he could still use it as a normal guitar - but all that external switching never paid off. I mean, one of the most common things ever has got to be switching from, say, neck to bridge PU during a solo spot to help "intensify" things. With that external switching, not only would you have to be close to your pedalboard all the time, no, you'd also have to program a separate patch for each PU position.
Alternatively, you could of course as well not make the external switching programmable. But what about when you need to switch patches and pickups? Double feet action - whereas my hand would just flick the PU switch while stepping on the buttons responsible for the patches.

The only thing I really liked was when he built the thing back. As he had all that stuff intact already, he came up with some switching that would route the pickups through different signal paths. When he showed that to me, neck and bridge were even running through entirely separated systems - and I gotta say that playing through that setup was quite impressive. But it probably wouldn't have made *that* much of a difference if it was only one plain guitar signal being split. Part of the sensation very likely has been that back then you didn't have an option to easily split your signal and amplify each side separately - which is a piece of cake today (and not even remotely expensive anymore).

Anyhow, if that was such a great thing, I'm sure more folks would do it - it's not exactly much of a technical issue, especially in case you're only using a guitar with 2 pickups, in that case a bog standard XLR cable would do.
 
TSJMajesty said:
a special cable not only carries your signal, but also the means to switch on 1,2,3, or any combination of your PU's, down to some type of foot controller.
Click to expand...
It would require a lot of retooling, and what about when that special cable goes haywire? Also, the basic switching already available on most guitars would make this system moot. I can already switch pickups, do coil splits, etc with the existing hardware. Add to that another foot controller taking up valuable stage floor space.
 
I think it’s a great idea personally. A good candidate might be to start with active pickups (like Fishman or something like that) since they already have a battery. They could make them respond to midi messages so you could add pickup settings changes to your modeler scene changes.
 
It's a cool idea and not very hard to pull off. Billy Sheehan has been doing this with his basses for decades and I think the Dustin Kensrue EBMM Stingray does it too.

I think it's a bit of a juggling act to do with a traditional pedalboard unless you're bringing out a wet/dry amp setup but into a contemporary modeler it would be awesome. Lots of options there.
 
This is a cool idea

I’ve never been particularly smooth at changing pickups/knobs mid song and often times at gigs I’ll just stick in one position even if a pickup position change would suit the tone better for different parts
 
The Vigier Nautilus II does that. It was in production for one run then they but they stopped to improve it more, according to DJ Scully, their US manager. You can find a NAMM video of it on YouTube.

The cool thing was, it was going to work with any Vigier with a pickguard.
 
Oh, and I believe the now defunct EBMM Game Changer may have done that too. There is a thread out there detailing that a tiny company called PMT made Guitar Max, a way to switch pickups and wiring digitally, EBMM had them install it to a prototype, then released the Game Changer based on it. It ended up in litigation. I read all this in forum threads, so I can't vouch for the veracity. But in one of the threads, PMT chimed in that it was true.
 
Eagle said:
Because you don’t need it.
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-You- might not need it right now, or you just might not know you need it. Imagine time traveling back to 1970 and saying "an amp that changes sounds with a footswitch? You don't need it."

Personally I'd love to be able to hit a single footswitch and have everything about my rig swap to exactly what I wanted, pickups included. Actually, if anything, I think being able to change guitar pickup settings with your feet would be more useful than being able to change amp channels.
 
GreatGreen said:
-You- might not need it right now, or you just might not know you need it. Imagine time traveling back to 1970 and saying "an amp that changes sounds with a footswitch? You don't need it."

Personally I'd love to be able to hit a single footswitch and have everything about my rig swap to exactly what I wanted, pickups included. Actually, if anything, I think being able to change guitar pickup settings with your feet would be more useful than being able to change amp channels.
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It is easy to switch mid solo, I don’t know why anyone would think it is not.
 
if you had a midi interface in your guitar it would be easy . You would need a total rethink about guitar internal electrics. I don’t know if it could be put just in a switch and work through a guitar cable. Marshall manages full switching on the JVM through a regular guitar cable. I still don’t know it enough people would pay what it would cost to do something that nobody else is asking for. Make it and sell it if you think it has potential.
 
Eagle said:
Only if you can’t work a switch while playing.
Can’t you do that easily too?
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“You can flip a channel switch on the front of your amp to change the channel just as easily as you can hit a foot switch. You don’t need that.”

You’re still not helping yourself dude. Why are you so bent on refusing to acknowledge that it might be a good thing for some people to have solutions that make life easier for them, whether or not you also might also find utility in those solutions?
 
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